Management of non-volatile memory devices such as flash memory devices may include performing maintenance operations at the memory. For example, “garbage collection” may be used to free portions of memory (e.g. blocks of a flash memory) for reuse. When a non-volatile memory device receives an instruction to write data to its memory and an insufficient amount of free memory is available to store the data, the memory device may perform a garbage collection operation prior to writing the data. However, performing garbage collection prior to writing the data may delay the completion of the data write until after a timeout period associated with the instruction has expired.